1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to filling a vacant seat at a casino gaming table, in general, and to apparatus for alerting the availability of a vacant poker table seat, in particular.
2. Description of the Related Art
As is known and understood, “gaming” is an increasingly popular form of entertainment. Games, particularly games of chance and skill in which one or more players play and place wagers on the outcome, may be played in a variety of ways—most oftentimes at a casino or like venue. Of the various forms of games which are available for play, many are played with playing cards—of which poker is arguably the most popular.
As has been described, poker is traditionally played in a poker room in which a plurality of players are seated at a plurality of poker tables facing a dealer, with the players wagering paper, coin money or chips on a series of playing cards dealt from a deck of fifty-two cards. Given the significant interest in playing poker, many poker rooms are consistently at capacity—especially at casinos. As such, the casino often employs some sort of system to establish a waiting list for new players to fill vacant seats when they become available. Typically, this requires use of a floor staff.
As will also be appreciated by the casino poker player, the room where all this activity is going on is quite frantic—saying the room is “noisy” begs the question; the arrangement being “frenetic” is a better description of the premises.
Usually, the way the floor operations conventionally work is that when a vacant seat becomes available, a floor person simply directs a player from the que of those waiting to the general area where the table awaits. Oftentimes, the dealer at that table just yells as to the availability of a vacant seat—and the players already at that table, as well as the dealer himself/herself, then must wait until the new player locates the table and the vacant seat. Frequently, when arriving there, the new player finds that the particular poker game being played is not one that he/she wishes to participate in—for example, being a “no-limit” game, when the new player is looking for one with a $2.00-$4.00 limit. In declining to participate in such a game, that player then has to return to the que, and the floor person then has to send a second player out to locate the table and vacant seat. Once more, the game being played may not be to that player's liking—and the players there, and the dealer there, similarly have to wait, again, in frustration, until a willing player is seated. Not only does this cut down on the enjoyment of the players already gaming there, but cuts down the number of hands that can be played at that table in any instant of time.
What also leads to the confusion, in delaying any start of a new hand when a vacant seat is to be filled, is that the individual poker tables are not readily “numbered” so as to be noticeable. Even if a floor person were to direct a new player to proceed to “Table No. 6”, for example, the absence of visible table numbering just produces a shuffling about of the new player from one table to another in an attempt to locate the table from more than the just general pointing in a particular direction by the floor person. This becomes all the more confusing during “tournament play”, when numbered table signs are removed at the start of the tournament, and then players are redirected towards other tables during consolidation of play—i.e., once the table number signs are removed, those players continuing in the tournament experience confusion in finding the tables to which a consolidation takes place, once those table number signs are no longer there.
As will be appreciated, all these traditional manners of supervising the casino room operation makes the poker playing more difficult, makes it more frustrating for the players waiting for a hand to begin, and makes it more costly for the casino operator through the delay in getting hands dealt. As will also be appreciated, these same problems would be understood to exist where other similar table games are being played—such as blackjack, 3 card poker, Caribbean stud poker, etc.